Abandoned

One of the disadvantages of ‘wet on wet’ painting is the difficulty in drawing very fine lines onto the wet layer of paint. One method I employed for a few years of painting was using a large brush and suggest details. Now I am trying to control the fine lines, and the ‘short cut’ of the large brush is too generic for what I’m trying to do now. The large brush technique has a ‘rubber stamp’ feel to it, in that the shape and texture of the brush is recognisable in different parts of the painting. Don’t get me wrong, I think the ‘hand of the artist’, as revealed by brush strokes, is very important in a painting. I think this, because we live in a machine age and whilst there is great art been produced by machines (which was never possible before) there is also art which is hand made and should look so.

As a landscape artist, I am trying to create a world into which the viewer likes to travel. For the most part, it has to be imaginary with recognisable bits, so the traveller feels ‘at home’. One of the bits is very fine lines, especially in trees. I have been scratching the paint surface with a sharp knife to simulate fine lines and I’m still looking at other methods. This time I dropped blobs of very liquid paint onto the surface and used a pen to draw the paint into lines. It was reasonably effective as you will see in the trees on the right in this painting.

Here is the video of the process. There is more info about this painting in the previous post here.